"Men… think in herds … they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."

Three good points from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism

by Naomi Colvin

The first change that is necessary is that which happens on a psychological level

What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism[*] is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our cooperation

How to break the spell Pt. I

Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort.

Why politics is key (How to break the spell, Pt. II)

Although people are interpellated now as consumers – and, as Wendy Brown and others have pointed out, government itself is presented as a kind of commodity or service – they still canno help but think about themselves as (if they were) citizens.

The book itself is well worth reading. I sketched out something extremely preliminary on a potential Pt III here. All parts rely on highlighting basic needs and desires (competency, control. community) that are not well served by what we have now.

[*] I’m going to take ‘capitalism’ there to mean the particular corporatist situation that prevails in the UK and elsewhere today.